UPDATE: Gerard Robinson, Florida's education commissioner, has issued a response to the mounting criticism over how English-learners will be treated in the state's newly revamped accountability system, in a letter to Tampa Bay Times education blogger Jeff Solochek, who is keeping close tabs on the controversy.

Florida has recently become the epicenter of a big tussle over how best to hold schools accountable for the academic progress of English-language learners, and there are undoubtedly lessons and insights for other states to consider, especially as many of them revamp their accountability systems in pursuit of waivers from the federal No Child Left Behind law.

And that's exactly how the debate in the Sunshine State got started. As one of the first states to be granted a waiver from NCLB by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year, Florida had to promise to re-do its waiver plan to more fully include the performance of English learners and students with disabilities into its school grading system—which is at the heart of its accountability system. When the state board of education voted in February to include the scores of ELLs on the FCAT (the state's assessment system) after just one year of instruction, school district leaders, teachers who work with ELLs, and advocates protested, saying that schools with high numbers of English-learners would be penalized unfairly.

The grades that individual schools receive in Florida these days have some high stakes well beyond the realm of education accountability, including the recovery of real estate markets.

To assuage those concerns, state schools chief Gerard Robinson named a task force to make recommendations on how to more fairly include ELLs and special education students. That group was split into two subcommittees—one on ELLs, the other on students with disabilities—which drew up some detailed, nuanced recommendations.

Explaining that the U.S. Department of Education would reject many of the recommendations as incompatible with its rules in the waiver program, Mr. Robinson mostly disregarded—for now at least—the recommendations of the task force and kept in place the new rule that ELLs' FCAT scores would be included in a school's grade after just one year of instruction.

That decision has created a furor of sorts, prompting some push back from some of the state's most prominent Hispanic politicians. Now we'll have to see if the commissioner, still somewhat new to the Florida scene, does anything differently.

Ester de Jong, a professor of bilingual education at the University of Florida and a task force member, told me that a fundamental problem, in her view, is that the commissioner and the U.S. Department of Education seem to be suggesting that "full inclusion" of ELLs in the accountability system means testing them and factoring in their results just like any other student, without regard for their wildly varying levels of English proficiency. "This is a case of where 'same' is not 'equitable,'" she told me.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Judging the output of newly-introduced bills and resolutions from state lawmakers in the first three months of this year, 2012 is on track to be less focused on immigration issues than 2011, according to a new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In the first quarter of this year, 865 bills and resolutions related somehow to immigration or refugees were introduced in 45 states and the District of Columbia, the report found. That is a 44 percent drop from the first three months of 2011, when NCSL says that more than 1,500 such bills were introduced. A handful of legislatures aren't currently in session, which could explain, in part, the decrease.

The greatest number of bills so far this year focus on law enforcement, followed closely by those related to employment and public benefits. Nine states have immigration "omnibus" legislation pending—measures that would enact a sweeping array of changes related to immigration law enforcement, employment verification, and verification of lawful status to receive public benefits.

Twenty-five states are debating education-related measures, many of them focused on residency requirements for in-state tuition or state financial aid for higher education. Several of them seek to require data collection, reporting, or cost-estimates for students here unlawfully who are attending public schools. That same type of provision was part of Alabama's enacted H.B. 56—considered to be the nation's toughest immigration law—and was put on hold by a federal court. It's also the kind of requirement that the U.S. Department of Justice does not view favorably, as we've seen in Alabama.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A survey released this week by two organizations that favor private school vouchers and other forms of school choice shows that Latino voters are more concerned about improving the quality of K-12 education than they are about reforming immigration policies.

Like all voters surveyed, Latinos listed the economy and job creation as their chief area of concern. Latinos in the survey ranked improving K-12 education as their next top issue over budget deficit reduction, which was the second-ranked issue for all voters. Fifty-eight percent of Latinos agreed with the statement that "we need to hear more from the presidential candidates on how they will improve education," compared to 37 percent who agreed with the statement that "we need to hear more from the presidential candidates on other issues before we talk about education." The poll was conducted on behalf of two pro-school choice groups—the American Federation of Children and the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options.

Reforming immigration policy fell into fifth place out of the five areas that pollsters asked respondents to rank in terms of importance for local and state governments to address. That was the case for both all voters and Latino voters.

The poll queried 750 likely voters in five Latino-heavy states: Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, New Jersey, and Nevada. The interviews were done by telephone in English and in Spanish. Many of the survey's questions centered around people's views on school choice issues, such as publicly-funded vouchers for special education students to attend private schools, and "opportunity scholarships," which are generally private school vouchers provided to low-income families.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

CORRECTION AND UPDATE: The Ed. Dept. wants to make clear that this report is not the "biennial" update to Congress mandated by federal law. This report was independently commissioned by the department. I regret my misunderstanding. The 2008 biennial report will be published later this month. And the 2010 biennial report will probably be out by the end of summer.

Most of the nation's English-language learners were enrolled in school districts that failed to reach all of their accountability goals for that group of students in the 2008-09 school year, according to a national evaluation of the federal program that supports English-language-acquisition services.

While more than half of the school districts that receive federal funding to support programs for ELLs reported meeting all their academic goals in 2008-09, those districts served only 39 percent of the total ELL population. And, in that same school year, only 10 states achieved all of their accountability goals for English-language learners under the No Child Left Behind Act.

"It's the most comprehensive report we've seen and it gives us a very good snapshot in time of both how far states and districts have come to develop and implement the requirements of Title III," said Kathleen Leos, who was the director of the Education Department's office of English-language acquisition during President George W. Bush's administration. "But it also tells us how much further they need to go to change the actual achievement results for English-language learners."

Those findings are part of a long-awaited evaluation of Title III—the section of the NCLB law that authorizes federal aid to states and local school districts for English-language-acquisition programs. They provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the overall academic progress of the nation's 5.5 million English-language learners, the fastest-growing subgroup of students in America's public schools. The Title III study was conducted by researchers at the Washington-based American Institutes for Research and released today by the U.S. Department of Education.

The report found that states and school districts have made major strides in developing and putting into practice systems with defined standards for English learners and assessments for measuring results, although there is wide variability in how the states define who an English-language learner is and what constitutes academic progress for such students.

"Over the decade, there has been a great deal of activity and change that shows how Title III has prompted states and districts to pay a lot more attention to both the language and the content needs of this population," said James Taylor, one of the report's authors. "But meeting the needs of this population is still a work in progress."

The evaluation of the $732-million-a-year Title III program found that "states and districts are largely complying with the major provisions of the law." Nearly all states reported that they have aligned English-language proficiency standards with state content standards in at least one core subject and that they have also linked state English-proficiency tests with their proficiency standards.

But the researchers also noted large variations in how states and school districts define which students are English-language learners and when they have reached the point of proficiency.

In all but eight states and the District of Columbia, local districts have discretion in how to identify ELLs. In the same vein, only 19 states had established consistent criteria for school districts to follow to determine when students no longer need English-language-acquisition services.

Still, one English learner expert notes, the report found that states and school districts have made significant progress in developing and putting into practice more consistent systems for serving English-learners.

"If you go back just 10 or 15 years, most states had no English-language proficiency standards and offered a long menu of different types of English-proficiency assessments that were completely non-comparable," said Robert Linquanti, a senior research associate with WestEd, a San Francisco-based education research and development organization. "The other reality is that you had districts who did not assess these kids annually or even look at how they were doing for years, and there was no real focus on the relationship between the development of English-language proficiency and their progress on academic subject matter."

Raúl González, the director of legislative affairs for the National Council of La Raza, said the report demonstrates that states and districts have focused attention on English-language learners in a way that is creating a "demand for better products and services for these children."

But he described states and districts as still largely in an "R and D," or research and development, stage of figuring out the best materials and instructional strategies to use.

"States and districts realize they need better programming, but they are still struggling to find it," he said.

Roughly half of the school districts reported that they lacked good information on research-based curriculum and instruction for English learners.

The 40 states that fell short of making all three goals in the 2008-09 school year were not required to report on which ones they failed to meet.

The 10 states that did meet all accountability goals in all three areas for ELLs—known as "annual measurable achievement objectives," or AMAOs—were Alabama, Delaware, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Under the rules of Title III, each state sets its own specific AMAOs, which are goals for progress in learning English as measured by results on English-language-proficiency exams, attainment of fluency in English, and demonstration of ELLs' proficiency on state content tests in reading and mathematics.

That's a slight setback from the last update on Title III. In a series of research briefs on Title III that were released by the Education Department in May 2010, analysts said that 11 states met their accountability goals for English-language learners in the 2007-08 school year.

At the school district level, 80 percent of Title III districts reported that they had met their first two goals: making progress in learning English and attaining English proficiency. Sixty-four percent of them reported that they had also reached their third goal by making adequate yearly progress for the English-language-learner subgroup on state reading and math assessments, as well as other indicators such as attendance and graduation rates, according to the study.

But one-third of Title III districts—which collectively served about one-half of the ELLs that receive Title III support nationwide—reported in 2008-09 that they had missed one or more of their goals for English-learners for two or four consecutive years, which subjected them to accountability actions such as developing improvement plans and notifying parents of their status. In those districts that fell short for two or four consecutive years on their goals for ELLs, 71 percent also were identified for improvement or corrective action under Title I of the NCLB law.

The AIR research team interviewed Title III and assessment directors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, conducted a nationally representative survey of more than 1,500 school districts receiving Title III funds, and used data collected in case studies of 12 Title III districts in five states.

Other major findings in the report include notable differences in Title III per-pupil funding levels among the states, even though the funds are disbursed by formula. In 2009, for example, Pennsylvania allocated $457 per student at the high end, compared with Alaska's $86 per-pupil allocation on the low end. California, with the nation's largest population of English-learners, allocated $115 per student in that same year. Those disparities, the report explains, stem in part from the formula's use of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey rather than reports of English-language learner enrollment from state education agencies. Officials in just nine states said they believed the resources provided by Title III were adequate.

How states handled their Title III funding has drawn federal scrutiny off and on since NCLB was enacted.

The report also found that in the 2009-10 school year, 74 percent of Title III districts reported having 100 percent of their teachers serving English-learners "fully certified" to do so. But nearly the same percentage of districts said that the "lack of expertise among mainstream teachers to address the needs" of English-learners was a "moderate or major challenge."

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Census Bureau reports today that the population of foreign-born people living in the United States has reached 40 million, an all-time high. That figure—from the 2010 American Community Survey—comprises about 13 percent of the total population in the U.S., which is roughly 312 million people. That represents the largest share of the population since 1910, when foreign-born residents comprised 14.7 percent of the overall population.

About one-third of those foreign-born residents entered the U.S. since 2000. Between 2000 and 2010, the foreign-born population grew by about 9 million residents, though that growth slowed considerably in the second half of the decade, according to Elizabeth M. Grieco, who is the chief of the Census bureau's foreign-born population branch. That rate of growth, while robust, was not as brisk as it was between 1990 and 2000.

Foreign born is defined by the Census Bureau as anyone who was not a U.S. citizen at birth, including naturalized U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, and unauthorized immigrants.

Latin America, of course, was the biggest source of foreign-born residents, at more than 50 percent, and more than half of them were born in Mexico. But immigration from Mexico has come to a standstill in the last five years, according to data released last month by the Pew Hispanic Center.

While foreign-born residents live in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, more than a quarter are in California, while another quarter are spread among just three other states: Texas, New York, and Florida.

About half of all foreign-born residents either spoke only English at home or spoke a language other than English at home and spoke English "very well," according to the report, but there was considerable variation between the regions of origin. For those from Africa, for example, 71 percent either spoke only English at home or spoke another language at home in addition to speaking English "very well." For those from Latin America, however, that share was much lower at 37 percent. Drilling down even more, the foreign-born residents from the Caribbean were more likely to speak only English at home at 32 percent, compared to 15 percent from South America, 7 percent from "other" Central America, and 3 percent from Mexico.

That same variation shows up in educational attainment levels as well, with 88 percent of foreign-born residents from the Africa region having a high school degree or higher, compared to 53 percent for those from Latin America, which includes the Caribbean.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Eighth grade English learners significantly trail their native English-speaking peers in science achievement and gained no ground at all in the last two years, according to results from the Nation's Report Card that were released today.

Findings from earth, life, and physical sciences on the 2011 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, show that English learners made no improvement from two years ago when the exam was last given. Their average score was 106 on a 300-point scale and falls 21 points short of a scale score of 127, which is the bottom of the "below basic" category. In 2009, the average score for ELLs was 103, compared to 151 for non-ELLs. The average score for students with disabilities in 2011 was somewhat better than that for ELLs at 124, but also falls below the lowest possible score to even be considered "below basic."

The types of questions students needed to answer correctly to reach the "below basic" level included identifying an example of kinetic energy or recognizing how plants use sunlight.

Overall, 8th graders improved their performance in 2011 over 2009. The average score rose from 150 to 152, a statistically significant increase, but still below a score that demonstrates proficiency. The exam was given to a nationally representative sample of 122,000 8th graders from more than 7,200 schools.

What do we make of this performance for English learners? How many were excluded from even taking the science NAEP? What percentage of those who did take it are recently-arrived immigrants versus those who would be considered long-term ELLs who have been in U.S. schools for six years or longer and still haven't acquired English? How many of these students have even had access to rigorous, grade-level science content? And how many of them have been well supported in developing their "academic language" in science?

Overall, 17 percent of NAEP science test takers were identified as ELLs or students with disabilities and 15 percent of them took the test, according to the report. NAEP, in a bid to include more students in its testing sample, allows for most of the same testing accommodations that are permitted when taking state or district tests. For the science exam, the most commonly used accommodation was extra time and taking the test in a small-group format.

Of course, there are problems with looking for meaning in these results for ELLs because within the subgroup, there is a big range of language skills, ranging from beginner to advanced, and the makeup of the group is constantly changing. Once students reach proficiency, they are reclassified as such and are no longer designated as ELL, which is a key reason why educators and language experts have been pushing for policymakers to require that the data for reclassified ELL students be reported over several years. And of course, there is the whole question of validity and whether these students should even be tested for mastery of a content area in a language that they haven't yet acquired.

There are a number of research efforts underway to study and improve science instruction for English-learners, several of them supported with grants from the National Science Foundation. The best known is the project in Florida overseen by NYU professor Okhee Lee, who has developed a curriculum and professional development for teachers.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a bid to make Puerto Rico a full-fledged bilingual society, Gov. Luis Fortuño has rolled out a controversial proposal that would make English the primary language of instruction in all courses taught in the island's public schools. Spanish grammar and literature classes would still be offered under the Republican governor's plan to make the U.S. territory fully bilingual within the next decade.

According to this Associated Press story, all of Puerto Rico's public schools are required to teach the English language from kindergarten through high school, but just a dozen of Puerto Rico's public schools offer an all-English curriculum as envisioned by Fortuño. U.S. Census data show that nearly all Puerto Ricans report speaking Spanish at home and that well more than half do not consider themselves to be fluent in English.

The AP story also says that 9,000 Puerto Rican teachers are devoted to teaching the English language in public schools. That seems like a pretty solid pool of teacher capacity to build on for the Fortuño plan, but the territory's former education secretary, Gloria Baquero, says many of those teachers struggle with speaking English fluently. Roughly 473,000 children were enrolled in Puerto Rico's public schools in 2010-11, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Some critics of the governor's proposal believe he's pushing to make English the primary language used in public schools for political reasons—chiefly, his aim to make Puerto Rico the 51st U.S. state.

Statehood and Puerto Rico's relationship with English are prickly topics. You may remember a couple of months ago when former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum mistakenly insisted in media interviews that until Puerto Rico adopted English as its "official language," it could not become the 51st state. Puertorriqueños responded with a resounding primary win for Mitt Romney, who, some GOP strategists have speculated, is keeping Fortuño on his list of potential running mates.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new and stern letter from the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice to the Alabama state schools chief has affirmed what many educators in the state already know—the state law cracking down on undocumented immigrants drove unprecedented numbers of Hispanic children out of public schools. (Hat tip to Fox 10 TV, which posted a copy of the letter.)

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general who oversees the civil rights division of the Justice Department, writes that the rate of absences of Hispanic children was triple that of other groups of students in the immediate period after the law, commonly referred to as H.B. 56, took effect last fall. He specifically points out high absence rates for English-language learners, who, by being out of school, "failed to receive the educational services to which they are legally entitled." And, Mr. Perez notes, the withdrawal rate for Hispanic students was 13.4 percent between the beginning of the school year and February of this year.

Justice Department folks also have been conducting interviews with Latino students in Alabama, some of whom reported being "singled out to receive notices or attend assemblies about H.B. 56, based on their actual or perceived national origin or immigration status," according to the letter. It also states that many Hispanic students—most of whom are U.S.-born—reported feeling "unwelcome" in schools that they had attended for years.

The letter seems to make very clear that the Justice Department intends to keep a very close watch on how Alabama's H.B. 56 directly impacts schools, even though the school-related provisions of the law are on currently on hold while the Obama Administration challenges the entire statute in court. Remember that Mr. Perez last fall demanded that nearly 40 school districts with sizable Hispanic enrollments provide data on withdrawals and absences to his office, which sparked a bit of feud between him and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Four-year-old children with parents who speak little to no English reap important benefits by participating in one year of center-based care—such as Head Start or state preschool—before starting kindergarten, a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California concludes.

Specifically, these so-called "linguistically isolated" children, who have virtually no exposure to the English language in their home and neighborhood environments, demonstrate much stronger early-reading skills than their peers who do not attend a center-based preschool program prior to starting kindergarten, the study concludes. The vast majority of these children, both in California and nationally, are Latino. The researchers did not find the same improvements for children's math skills, which "suggests that center-based programs serving linguistically isolated children are missing the opportunity to promote readiness in mathematics," according to the study's summary.

We know that Latino 3- and 4-year-olds, as a subgroup, are the least likely to participate in a high-quality early-education program, often because of a lack of access to such programs.

And though California has a higher participation rate of linguistically isolated children in its public preschool programs than the nation as a whole, the PPIC study found that one-third of the state's population of linguistically isolated 4-year-olds are not enrolled in any kind of center-based programs. In a state where roughly half of preschool-age children have immigrant parents, and about 20 percent of those are linguistically isolated, that's a lot of untapped potential.

And unfortunately, because of California's relentless budget woes, funding for state preschool—which has already taken deep spending cuts—is not likely to be on an upward trajectory.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There's a new study out this week to add to the mounting stack of evidence that being bilingual has tremendous advantages, beyond the obvious one of being able to communicate with more people.

The latest comes from a pair of Northwestern University researchers who say that people who are bilingual have enhanced memory and are better able to pay attention. In a new study published in the April 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, bilingualism expert Viorica Marian, auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus,and three other scholars, examined how bilingualism affects the brain—specifically looking at the subcortical auditory regions.

Using two groups of teenagers—23 bilingual English and Spanish speakers and 25 English-only speakers—the researchers recorded the students' brainstem responses to speech sounds as they heard them in two conditions. In a quiet condition, the teenagers responded similarly, but against a noisy background, those with bilingual brains were "significantly better" at "encoding the fundamental frequency of speech sounds known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects," according to the study. In other words, the bilinguals' brains were far superior to the monolinguals' brains at sorting through the noise to pick out the spoken syllable "da."

So what does this mean exactly?

Professor Marian explains it this way: "Bilinguals are natural jugglers," she said in a news release about the study's publication. "The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved 'inhibitory control,' or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others."

Can we expect that this study might have some impact on education policy when it comes to making decisions about educating English-learners? Dual-language programs are certainly popular among upper-income parents who want their children to learn a second language and they are increasingly becoming more available to ELL students, allowing them to build their literacy in their native language at the same time they learn English, but these programs are a long way from being accessible to the masses.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend